"Ghost" Guest User Account

Hello Grady,

I talked to a senior advisor @ Apple this morning, and he walked me through fixing this problem:

Open Terminal from Spotlight:

Once there type the following sudo command:

sudo fdesetup remove -user Guest

then, enter your password the you use to log in to your system as an administrator, and press the Return key

Finally, Restart the computer, and the icon will be gone.

Hopes this helps everyone with the same problem.

Sincerely,

Renzzo

You have created a new user account , by entering into users and groups opening the padlock by entering the admin name and password , clicking on plus sign and creating as admin or standard account ( filled up a new name and password ) .For example " previous " .And checked the boxes as shown in the picture .

Then logged out from your original Amin account , by taking cursor on apple logo and log out from your original admin account .

Then , it will prompt to enter your new admin account name and password , in the example the name is " previous " .

Thats the reason in login window , you can see your original admin name ( you must have saved the photo ) , and also the the new account named " previous " .

Its your decision to keep the new account or if you want to delete it , select it and click on minus sign , a window appears , select the option delete the home folder , click on delete user .

Same way , select " previous " public folder and delete .

credit to here4evr and sequential on How can I turn off the 'Other' user login in High Sierra GM? | MacRumors Forums

I followed the root login and delete guest, it works on mine.

Thank you!!! However, you must first enable the root account using the instructions here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204012, log out of the admin account, log in with the newly enabled root account, open terminal, VERY CAREFULLY enter "dscl localhost delete /Local/Default/Users/Guest" exactly (without the quotation marks), log out of root, DISABLE the root account using the reverse procedure above, and all is good in the High Sierra world again regarding the ghost guest account with the artifact icon.

This is very helpful. It really makes my day. Still, I would make search result came up with something like "unknown" Guest User or so on since I really didn't think of Ghost as the keyword search at all.

Unknown Guest User on MacOS High Sierra.

Good day:

I tried the procedure you outlined. Here’s what I got when I put in my password:

Error: unable to remove user with the uuid ‘FFFFEEEE-DDDD-CCCC-BBBB-AAAA000000C9 ‘ (-69594) .

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Cheers!

This solution completely removes the guest user from the login screen.

I mean even if you enable guest user next time, it will not show up at all on the login screen.

This seems workaround. is there any way to activate guest user again If I want to?

Thank you for the solution.

However, I also had a fresh reinstall and it should not have done that as I did not migrate anything. 'Why' is the operative word for me. Is this normal?

It would appear that others have this issue too, so I guess it's not a hacker at least.

Still I want to know - WHY? What is the cause? It is the only way to prevent the issue in the future and if anyone can answer this, I would appreciate it very much.

I tried this and was not able to remove the "Ghost" Guest User account. When I entered "sudo fdesetup remove -user Guest" into the terminal, it said user not found. I have tried a number of things to remove this "Ghost" but nothing seems to work.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!

Thank you so much Renzzo. This also solved my question on topic How to delete "Guest User" under FileVault availability?

Grady Stebbins wrote:

Hey!

I recently purchased a used MBP

Did you use the SetUp assistant to migrate your user to the "new" Mac ?

I was able to resolve this issue by running the following command in Terminal:

sudo fdesetup remove -user Guest

(Credit Smoovejayy)